For those wishing to explore gardening in a variety of different socio-economic contexts and to extend debate beyond the career plantings of famous designers and their clients, Gardens and Green Spaces in the West Midlands since 1700 has much to recommend it. For those interested in urban history particularly, the collection does an excellent job of looking at the imprint of the city on designed spaces in the countryside, creatively situating the realms of art, science, civic politics and cultural life in the milieu of green space. As such, this edited work (which is based on a series of papers relating to landscapes and green space from the Annual Conference of the Centre for West Midlands History, 2014) offers a useful guide to those wishing to trek up the garden path to find entangled stories of place, power and a keen rural–urban dialogue at play. This makes the new world of garden history at once expansive and interconnected, a point championed in the Preface by Timothy Mowl, Emeritus Professor in the History of Architecture and Designed Landscapes from the University of Bristol, who notes that the garden historian is necessarily a polymath (p. xv) and, indeed, by editors Malcolm Dick and Elaine Mitchell in the introduction to this collection.

An important contribution to what landscape historian Tom Williamson has called ‘the new garden history’ then, Gardens and Green Spaces in the West Midlands since 1700 takes its reader on a tour of disparate regional geographies that are collectively bound by a common thread of greening, manufacturing innovation and cross-cultural fertilization. It begins in Herefordshire, where David Whitehead shows how the philosophical and planting inclinations of the picturesque movement found fertile soil in an agricultural ‘county landscape’, before plotting further contours of agricultural–aesthetic mixing at the Leasowes Garden, near Halesowen, the subject of a chapter by John Hemingway. More challenges to the garden-heterodoxy are delineated in the next three chapters, where Harriet Devlin turns to an iconic industrial landscape, Coalbrookdale, to reveal the importance of green walks and garden-based resorts in the designs for early industrial tourism; Elaine Mitchell excavates the disappeared landscape of Birmingham's Vauxhall Gardens to see green entertainment at work in the industrial town; and Dianne Barre points to women as active agents in emparkment and leisure in her study of Derby's ‘Widow Spinks’. Reading green landscapes across the grain is equally the project of Katy Layton-Jones and Maureen Perrie, whose insightful surveys of park-o-tecture in public spaces and the archivally captured deliberations of the Cadbury and Chamberlain family over landscape aesthetics and suburban encroachment highlight the value of material culture and biographical trails in tracking a sophisticated and sometimes surprising eco-cultural history. Indeed, as Clare Hickman's penultimate chapter on green space, open air and therapeutic landscapes in Bromsgrove vividly illustrates, it is on the methodological borderlands where particularly intriguing (and prescient) conversations are to be found about the sinuous relations between people, place and physical/mental well-being. Ending the whistle-stop tour of Midlands green space in our present, Joe Hawkins charts his own restoration schemes for Hagley Park – itself an interesting reminder that garden historians and horticultural practitioners gain much from talking to each other.

Gardens and Green Spaces in the West Midlands since 1700 certainly leads by example in providing a richly illustrated journey through the varied possibilities of garden history. We see the garden here as a richly textured landscape, full of personalities and powerbrokers, allusions and aesthetic markers, commercial concerns and cultural refractions. There are excellent explorations here of the fecund links between urban and rural, green and grey, and a keen hint of the multitude of different actors (across class and gender lines) who wandered up the garden path (so to speak). Especially interesting is the focus of the collection on industrial iconography, which usefully plays off the traditional notion of green space as an antidote to, or an escape from, city life. Most importantly for readers of this journal, the garden, as it turns out, was engaged in a synchronous dialogue with urban space – from its traditional casting as binary curative to the polluting machinations of industrialism to the deliberately placed engineering features which graced its confines. Perhaps the biggest criticism to be levelled at the collection is that the methodological and conceptual themes that track across the chapters are not tackled explicitly and comparatively. It would also have been useful to think in terms of place as well as place-making (notably, was the West Midlands exceptional in its industrial–bucolic fusion?) and to draw some broader conclusions about green capital and the industrial age by glancing in the direction of economic and urban history. That said, the fascinating array of eco-cultural case-studies contained within Gardens and Green Spaces in the West Midlands since 1700 clearly indicates the value of further work in new garden history.